Beauty
by blinkblink
Summary: Snake's perception of beauty could be considered skewed. Disturbing imagery/ to a point implications. No MGS4 spoilers.


Disclaimer: Don't own MGS or the characters.

Snake fell in love with beauty when he was 17. Of course, to a teenager beauty was Pamela Anderson in a swimsuit; tanned skin, long splayed legs and the luscious swell of scantly concealed breasts. Two weeks later he shot his first man, a smooth triple tap to the head, in an empty locker room. The blood licked down the walls, caressing models printed on waxy paper in his place.

When he was 19, his squad snuck off base to celebrate some meaningless occasion, slipped into the third-best strip joint in the next town over. None of the faces were familiar, most covered with more paint than a canvas to hide the spreading crows feet and sagging skin and the world-weary twist of the lip, but he recognized in one of them the spark he had first fallen for two years ago. A fresh face with shining blue eyes and full lips and peaked nipples under a scrap of silk. The squad spent the next week being desensitized, watching hours of video and picture slid-shows on end until when he shut his eyes all he saw was naked corpses, beautiful throats accessorized by muscle-deep rope-marks, flat stomachs by bullet wounds, spread thighs by dark blood.

Snake visited Europe for the first time when he was 22. His future brought him to Florence, and mostly just to get out of the smoggy air, he walked through the Accademia Gallery. Most of it meant nothing to him; more iconography, more repetition, more wasted money. It was the statues that caught him, the living movement captured in cold stone; the genius of the intertwined figures chiselled out in the Rape of the Sabine Women, the sheer height and perfection of David, the hundreds of blind staring eyes in the 19th century gallery. He spent six hours in the otherwise bland, crowd-filled rooms, staring at beauty delved from the heart of marble slabs. And when he had finished, he walked out of the building, across town, and signed his life away to FoxHound.

A year later Snake travelled to his third continent, to the southern tip of Africa. Near the coast, the world on the other side of the jeep window was rich and green, ground covered with thick grass, ferns, trees, all sparkling with moisture. Further inland the land flattened out and green faded to gold, bright and shining under the afternoon sun. Masses of colourful birds he had never seen before soared overhead like jewels, the sound of their wings making a low hum in the air. Only once, in the thirsty shade of a wizened tree, he saw a pair of cheetahs lounging; long and lithe and streamlined in a way he could never hope to imitate. That evening, he painted the golden grass and green ferns red, and it glowed magnificent ruby red in the setting sun.

When he was 25, Snake found beauty for the first time within arm's reach. On the streets of Los Angeles, when he was looking for nothing but something to help him forget, and failing that maybe some trouble. Instead he found a girl wearing a miniskirt made from a strip of fabric and a torn shirt tied together over the shoulder, stick thin and sun-browned, sticking her hip out on the corner of a slum intersection. It wasn't the hip that caught his attention, or what little chest she had to hide under her faded RockStar shirt, but something about the way she moved long and slow and lithe and stared right past him like he wasn't there. The kind of blind stare he had seen in faces of marble, the movements he had seen under prickly trees, a grace the living rarely possessed. She was gone when he woke up; no name, no sound, no self. Almost a dream, almost unmarred by the waking world's newspaper excerpts: another crack-addict found dead on the streets of LA.

Snake found Zanzibar Land cold by night, windy and disturbingly open; unaffording of any protection for a soldier just landed there. He fell into a hollow in the uneven ground and hunkered down with a smoke to wait in irritation for dawn. It grew light before the sun rose over the mountains, lighting the world in a thin twilight at first, turning the twisting mist around him silver. As the sun crept higher in the sky, the light on the snowy peaks turned a pale pink, soft as a rose's petals, then darkening in hue to a lavender which blended into violet. The mist around his knees shifted too with the colours, reflecting those in the sky, fluid and shimmering like gasoline. When the sun drew nearer to the crest of the mountains the light became the red and orange of bright autumn foliage, and finally burst over the tops in a cascade of warm gold, spreading down through the valley like a river breaking through a dam. The early morning light brought life to the world, painting over the dark gloom of the night. A day later, he brought his own light to the world, the flickering flames of an aerosol fire, and although there was no life there, there was more splendour in the fiery carnage.

At 30, Snake found a second beauty within range. The huskies were swift and sleek, and they had the simple joy in life that he by then found so rare. They would run for hours, would gladly pull the weight of a sled behind them, would with a turn of their snow-white flanks race back to him at a spoken word. He delighted in them, for a while, in the life that ran so shallow under their fur, so that they almost shone with it. But eventually the second beauty, the one he had not recognised at first, began to eclipse them. Alaska was cold, treacherous, and heartless. And, when the sky was clear and the temperature was so low the mercury in the thermometer was almost invisible, it was breathtaking. Ice crystals flickered like frozen rainbows in the air, the snow burned white as stars, and above at night pastel rivers flowed through the black sky. A beauty that could freeze blood solid in veins, that could spear you straight through with blades of ice, that killed without thought or malice or intention. It was captivating.

When he was 33, Snake was broken out from under the ice of retirement, and found a fiery replacement to the Alaskan wilderness. He watched with horror in his heart as she was shot down in front of him, as blood dyed the snow scarlet, as the white mist of her breath turned red. But even while his rational mind cried out, he recognized her stunning beauty as she lay in sun-lit snow surrounded by a crimson halo, the shadow of death granting her an untouchable brilliance. He found, eventually, that here again was beauty within his possession. Later he would run his tongue over the raised scars, over the knots tied to her by death, strings now cut free, until she complained and drew his mouth instead to the swell of her breasts, the warmth between her thighs. But that wasn't where her beauty lay anymore, not for him. The magnificence he had seen in her was gone, and he couldn't live with its shade every day, waiting for it to return. Not when he knew what that would take.

Hal is not beautiful. He can be handsome, when he remembers to wash and takes the trouble to wear clothes which have not been pressed by his sleeping on them, and even then he wouldn't turn heads on the street. The only feature of his which worries Snake is his eyes, the bright silver-gray of stars, a pale fire in an otherwise unassuming face. But he covers them up, hides them away behind long distracting frames, and Snake thinks that perhaps just the hint of danger sweetens the attraction. Snake is 35, and knows by now that Hal could be beautiful, can imagine him snow-white in the cutting air of Alaska with his dark hair filled with shining crystals and his lips an icy blue. But living with the engineer, who often forgets such basic things as washing his hair and shaving and writes lengthy – if cramped – messages to himself on the back of his hand and moves in an awkward stumble with no grace at all, he finds that mostly he doesn't worry. Hal isn't beautiful. And Snake is glad.


End file.
